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So, did you see the study that said you should eat chocolate to lose weight? Well, it was fake.

That is, a group set out to see if they could scam the science and nutrition publishers. They did.

Quoting Howard Booth, “They managed to produce factually correct results that made an outlandish claim, write it up, get it published”. In other words, they lied without really telling any lies, and nobody caught it.

It is tempting to think science for profit is to blame, but this still goes to the government. Sure, the profit motive blinded the publications and those involved, but the blame for the mindset and culture of publishing drivel lies squarely at the governments that fund so much of the related research that provides the grist for these publishing mills.

Governments should protect our property. Nothing more. When they try to help us, they always do more harm than good.

A scientist / journalist shares his story of a sting operation on the scientific publishing process with frightening results.

Howard Booth writes:

An interesting sting was done on scientific publishing to show how remarkably easy it is to get published despite doing a poor research project (in this case on purpose). John Bohannon, a PhD chemist and science journalist, was contracted to do a documentary for German television on the poor research in nutrition that produces outlandish claims about diet and dietary supplements. They conspired to create a research study intended to produce fantastic results, and see how often their poor research would get called out through the entire publishing process.

The study had a terrible sample size, poor quality control, and zero peer review. They managed to produce factually correct results that made an outlandish claim, write it up, get it published (with their choice of venues as many…

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Very good to stretch ourselves and look hard at how the biblical writers viewed reality.

As to time, it is clear from the bible itself and from much cultural material of the time that they didn’t think of time as we do. Genealogies had nearly nothing to do with time, and everything to do with the pedigree of the owner of the writing, or the object of the writing, or perhaps the author.

Chapter 5 of Mark Harris’s book The Nature of Creation: Examining the Bible and Science looks at the biblical framework of creation. The concern is not so much the act of creation, but the way in which the bible’s authors talk about the nature of creation, especially time and space and the theological significance of this discussion. The challenge is to try, as much as we are able, to project ourselves back some two to three or four thousand years and imagine how the ancient Near Eastern audience pictured creation and God’s relationship to creation. Harris starts with two ideas that should guide the approach to scientific topics – including time and space – in the Bible.

First, we need to move away from a neat division between natural and supernatural. The Israelites certainly knew that there were a range of normal, regular processes in the world. However, they…

In March 2009 while the Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to fulfill a presidential campaign pledge to document that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment, a longtime employee, Alan Carlin, put out a 93-page report challenging the science being cited and the drift of the agency from its initial role to one captured by fanatical activists and alarmists, treating environmentalism more as a religion than based in science.

At the time Carlin was a 72-year-old analyst and economist who, as The New York Times put it, “had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.” His EPA career would span 38 years.

The website for his new book, “Environmentalism Gone Mad” says, “Dr. Alan Carlin is an economist and physical scientist with degrees from Caltech and MIT and publications in both…

Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

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Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

“It’s often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous…

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More than most, I’ve worked far away in different countries from my family. I could do it well but I never found it easy. It was always hard. Foreign lands, foreign people I suppose, ultimately foreign words in foreign languages and all that it comes down to is you, a stranger lost in a strange land, to echo A.E. Housman.

They converse with you, you talk back, and after a while because you know how to fit in and have a facility with words, you start to dream in their language and that’s sort of okay. It’s just dreamtime, only temporary and you’re just surfing in a wobbly way.

Your first impulses, never mind your gestures, gradually become culturally perfect and you begin to suspect you might never quite make it back home. The cuckoo in the nest starts digging in good and proper, deeper in than any Alabama tick as they say. You’ve gone native…

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The rock with our name on it is the real threat to humanity. There really isn’t anything else with the potential of extincting us.

This rock doesn’t actually seem worth worrying about. It buzzes earth every 16 years, and this year is one of its closer approaches. It has been out there a long time, and therein lies the worry. We spotted this on only its last close approach 16 years ago. It has been this close several times before. We can tell where this one will be for hundreds of years, but what about the ones we haven’t spotted yet?

It is sad that we are spending billions on trying to control the weather, something we will never be able to do (the energy requirements are just too great). We could spend a fraction of that and perhaps be ready when we notice the rock that will intersect our planet.

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Josh writes: It is extraordinary to think that Bjorn Lomborg first published The Sceptical Environmentalist 17 years ago in 1998 – that’s as long as The Pause!

However there has been no pause in some people ignoring his message as we have, rather depressingly, read on BishopHill over the weekend – see here and here.

It is really simple: the money we spend on Climate Change mitigation can be better spent on health, education and cheap energy. Why is this hard to understand? Do they think climate science is done in a moral vacuum? Can they not see that divesting from fossil fuels hurts the poor the most?